Mark McDonald

There are seven sources of waste or muda according to lean thinking.  One source, inappropriate processing, revolves around doing more than is necessary.  In manufacturing it involves subjecting work to additional and unnecessary steps in the process.  Implementing lean thinking involves looking at every process involved in the company’s work streams and asking is this necessary?  Is it happening in the right place, at the right time?  Or, are there alternatives that would be more effective, efficient, safe, etc.

There are significant opportunities to avoid inappropriate processing generated by IT and therefore significant savings opportunities for the enterprise and IT involved in looking at waste from this perspective.

Think of inappropriate processes as the persistence of old business rules, practices and systems that while still in production, have outlived their business relevance.  The application of technology, a business rule or process that is no longer business relevant or valid is an example of inappropriate processing.

Redundant rules and processes exist is just about every organization; creating opportunities to reduce waste.  These opportunities exist because business practices and IT systems are accretive.  They build on each other through time, accumulating and rarely being replaced.  Consider your current systems and processes, how long have they been in production.  Chances are you are working with processes and systems that have built up rather than being a replacement.  Processes and systems that have been more often added to than reduced or streamlined.

Identify inappropriate processing opportunities by asking the following questions of your major processes and systems:

• Why are we doing this?  What happens if we no longer do this?  What happens if we do less of it?  What is the good business reason for this?  Are we doing this just because we have always done it that way?

• When did we start doing this?  What was the rational or context at the time?  Can anyone still remember?

• How are we doing this, the resources, processes, etc?  Is this the only way to execute the process?  Can it be done for less cost?  Do we have an alternative or replacement approach for performing these tasks we could reuse?

These questions seem simple, but challenge yourself and your business colleagues to push on if the process, the business rule, the activity is really necessary. In many case the business reason for the rule is gone but the rule remains.  While it may seem that it is too much trouble to remove and retest a rule, these rules do represent inappropriate processing and are therefore waste.

Another source of inappropriate processing is resource overkill, also known as ‘gold platting’ solutions.  Over-provisioning service levels, taking on extra requirements or building beyond business needs are IT examples of this form of waste.  Often such gold platting happens in the name of risk, security, resiliancy, etc.  and those are valid reasons and therefore ‘appropriate processing” However, make sure that your team understands that effort applied after you have achieved the result is inappropriate and a form of waste.

A final note on inappropriate processing, IT executives should look at their own operational processes and procedures.  In some cases you are executing operational processes that were valid 5 or 10 years ago – for example processes to reduce online/batch contention – that may no longer be needed given new technology capabilities.  That is a case of old IT operational rules leading to inappropriate processing.

Inappropriate processing is to overproduction, another source of waste, and can leverage some of the same techniques.  It may seem like picking nits in terms of reviewing processes and business rules as after all if its cheap to process, then what is the real cost.  The answer is plenty when you consider the total cost of doing things you no longer need to do.

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Category: CIO Leadership Lean Thinking Tools     Tags:

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